Falling into Place(7)

She was more wobbly than ever by the time she got to the top, but she told herself that it was the adrenaline and the height making her sway. When she threw her head back, she could see the sky bending away from her, and it seemed closer than usual. As though if she tried, she could snag a star on her fingernail, but she didn’t move.

It hurt, hurt to hold still, so she leaned against the railing with the metal pushing against her lungs, and she closed her eyes.

“Well, hello, darling with the ocean eyes,

How many secrets keep us apart?

A sea of poems, a field of sighs,

Can I cross and return to the start?”

Liz turned off the music. Breathed, and looked up again to face the silence, but it wasn’t there. Not the kind she was running from. It was quiet, deeply so, but it was the kind of quiet that lived and moved and changed, filled to the brim with crickets and wings and the sounds of late summer.

Later, she lay on her back, staring at the curving sky and the stars, swallowed by the darkness so that she felt very small indeed. She wondered what was between the stars, if it was dead and empty space, or something else. That’s why there are so many constellations, she thought, remembering the ones from her fourth-grade science class—Leo, Cassiopeia, Orion. Maybe everyone just wanted to connect those pinpricks of brightness and ignore the mysteries in between.

Once upon a time, Liz was happy to TP a house with Julia and Kennie, to be invited to the best parties. Once upon a time, it made her happy to look down the social tower and see everyone below her. Once upon a time, it made happy her to stand here and see the entire sky above her.

And tonight—tonight, that was what she wished for. She wished to be happy, and fell asleep with an entire sky above her.



CHAPTER SIX


If She’s Determined


The waiting area of the emergency room is never empty, but right now, it’s about as close as it gets. There’s a man sitting with his elbows on his knees, staring at the ground. There’s a family huddled in a circle, with eyes closed in prayer. There’s a boy staring quietly out the window, a name on his lips.

And there, in the far corner, is Liz’s mom, quietly eating her last pack of peanuts from the plane and paging through a magazine.

When Liz was younger, people said that she got her face from her mother and everything else from her father. But Liz and her mother share a significant something else that neither of them will ever admit—they both like to play pretend.

So as her daughter lies dying on an operating table, Monica Emerson sits with her legs crossed, looking for all the world like she cares about which celebrity couple broke up this week. On the inside, she shakes to pieces.

She flips a page and thinks of the day Liz learned to walk. Monica had gone to the kitchen to get a box of rice crackers, and when she turned, Liz was standing there behind her, wobbling uncertainly. And even as Monica yelled for her husband to get the camera, she lifted Liz off the ground and back into her arms, thinking Not yet.

Not today.

Let her grow up tomorrow.

She flips another page. When she arrived, the doctor told her that even if Liz survives surgery, even if she doesn’t die today, even if, there’s a good chance that she’ll never walk again. No one can make promises.

Monica Emerson knows that the likeliest outcome will break her heart, so she does her best not to think about it. She thinks about nothing at all.

That’s the thing about Monica Emerson. She is a good person and a terrible mother.


In the operating room, there are tense whispers, the brush of metal against bone, the tinny, faraway beeping that means she’s still alive.

And finally, when it’s over, the beeping is still there. The doctors are masks and blood splatters, and all I can think is, This is no miracle.

One of them—Henderson, according to the blue scribble stitched into his front pocket—breaks away and walks slowly toward the waiting area, which is never a good sign. Doctors with good news are almost as eager to deliver it as the people in the waiting room are to hear it. Only doctors with bad news walk slowly.

Monica rises to meet him, and no one sees how her hands shake as she closes the magazine, lays it down gingerly as though afraid that her trembling will start an earthquake, make the entire world crumble.

But the doctor still walks slowly, and his steps undo her world anyway.

“She isn’t looking good,” Dr. Henderson tells Liz’s mom. For the third time—I’ve counted. She isn’t looking good, she isn’t looking good, she isn’t looking good. “We’ll keep a close eye on her for the first twenty-four hours, and reevaluate tomorrow.”